If you tell me log on duty during a 5 hour unload then I'll respectfully turn down all live loads

Anyone at all?

 

It's not how you log it that matters but whether or not you're getting paid. Sitting and waiting to get loaded/unloaded is performing a duty for the company. You are require to be there and be ready to move as soon as they're finished. Whether you spend that time on the dock watching/helping or in your sleeper berth reading or taking a nap matters not ... you should be paid. Your time is prescious. Don't work for companies that treat it otherwise.

 

I have ofton thought about this accident angle before. I even asked a guy I had contact with about it several years ago. He told me if your at fault their going to castrate you anyway. Your logs and other documents could be clean and correct. The problems come when you get hit by a crooked attorney. As a driver I was more concerned about attorneys in regard to truckers running 2 or 3 logs. Being found to have only got maybe 10 hours sleep in the past 3 or 4 days. I would never be concerned about not logging my dock time. It's just not a bad problem in todays world of 34 hour resets. As to that only logging 15 minutes. Most DOT cops know a fudged logbook when they see it. This is more like an open secret. I did not drive my truck in open fear of a lawsuit. I logged on duty when I had to and only the minimum amount. If I gets to the point that I have to throw away 15 to 30 hours in 8 days and cause me to have to do a 34 hour reset losing money in the process. I think I had rather go flip burgers.

 

Never do it. Because when you log that ON DUTY, you'll cost yourself money later. Those hours will disappear in the short run and even medium run. You'd be paying for the pleasure of sitting there and having the dock do its thing. Anything you log on duty will cost you money later, as you won't be able to use those hours for driving later today, tomorrow, the day after, the day after that....unless you get in a 34. And then THAT will cost you money. It's unreal what drivers allow out there, man.

 

Cameras? Try "on board tattle-tale truck computer". A laywer can get into your computer's records and find whatever he or she needs. Again, I can't believe what drivers have allowed to come about with these ELDs and HOS rules. Idiots.

 

I was thinking about this some this morning. I remember working our drop yard near Chicago. We had 4 loads in there that I was asked to take in to a warehouse. I was told these would be easy deliveries but they turned out to be long unloads. Nothing was on pallets in any of them. My average time on the dock with each load was 7 hours. That is roughly 28 line 4 hours. Now count the 90 minutes each way driving and you see If I had logged line 4 by the time I got finished I would have had almost 40 hours used. If This had been the case I would not have been able to finish my west coast money load without a service failure. As it was I think I had about 12 hours since my last reset and made that trip easy. Made a good paycheck with that trip plus the hourly pay I got for the Chicago time. Sorry but if I were still driving there is no way in hell I'm logging more then 15 minutes.

 

You kinda touched on this, but the problem doesn't come into play when the driver is at fault. The problem comes into play when the driver is not at fault.

Like the Werner 90 mil judgement proved, the driver can be 100% right and still be wrong. Now lets throw in logs that proves the driver should not have been there because if the logs were following the law, the driver could not have been there. Instantly the drivers fault even if he was doing everything else 100% correct.

 

No, your not looking at this from the primary standpoint. If a driver is not at fault and runs into a crooked Attorney you can't tell what is going to happen. My point is and I am going to stand on it that an Attorney is going to look for major HOS violations, not some log when a driver has actually went to bed during an unload and logged it off duty. This is apples and oranges. I will admit with today's elogs running multiple logs is getting harder to do and Attorneys that do Truck Law might start looking for things like this. The world of trucking is changing so much. I have started to not be as firm in my opinions like this as I once was. However I would not truck like this. This is most all I have to say on this topic.